Played a little hooky last Friday and went out to the Arnold Arboretum with friends for a few hours. It was a good trip, and I'm glad I went. The rest of the weekend was eaten up with helping my brother pack up stuff from his condo and get set up at his new apartment up in Ithaca. It's a minimum of a six hour trip, so by th time we got packed up and on the road Saturday, we had no chance of arriving in town with enough time left to do anything but crawl into the camper and sleep. So that's what we did. Sunday he picked up his keys, and we got the truck and the u-haul unloaded, and spent some time picking up supplies and essentials for the new place. Finished out the day with enough time to crawl into the camper and sleep. So we did. Monday was brunch, a last trip to the drugstore, and then the trip back to CT, where I quickly picked up my car and headed back home, spent a few hours settling back in and went to sleep.

On the upside, I did listen to the entire audiobook version of John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise, complete with the table of 700 hobo names.

I also had time to read the entirety of Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. First published in 1981, which means it came out the same year SIL was founded (And a few other groups, some more immediately drawn from the novel). For someone who is hip deep into LARPing, I suppose I should have read this a _long_ time ago, and now I have. You should too if you haven't. I need to get the sequels at some point. (Side note, I find it *very* interesting that the image on the cover has little to do with the story, in which neither dragon nor futuristic clothing and scenery features prominently. I surmise that the cover art is there entirely to draw in the unsuspecting browser in the bog standard book store which crowds fantasy next to sci-fi on the shelves. This book, which an uneducated shelver might place in either section [or even mystery...] may appeal enough to fanciers of either fantasy or sci-fi, so was deemed to need a cover that would draw the eyes of both...)

The cover you linked to is the re-issue. The original cover art was very recognizbly a scene from the book when the party is attacked by sea serpents.

As I recall, the second book ("The Barsoom Project") in the series was crap as they weren't really interested in the Dream Park angle but in exploring other stuff in that world and the story just happened to involve Dream Park. IIRC, the adventuring party are all overweight players who are doing a "fat camp" run to lose weight while gaming and the game had special settings to help them out. The third book ("The California Voodoo Game") was much better as it got back to the feel of the first book and updated the Park's technology to better reflect the actual direction it would happen in (much more VR, for instance). I don't know that you need to read the second book, I'd just skip to the third.